He has sensible plans to take Billy to Texas, where he can start buying modest houses and flipping them until he’s amassed enough real estate to set them up on firm financial ground.īilly has other plans. In the garage, Emmett finds what’s most important to him, after Billy: His 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser. That’s a wide load of metaphor for any book to bear, even one nearly 600 pages long. Here the author has chosen that most American of icons for his title and plot: a famous highway, dedicated in 1913, that not only spans the vast country from east to west but is named for the president who united its north and south. Not much links this novel with Towles’ other work - “ Rules of Civility” and “ A Gentleman in Moscow,” two books that also have little in common except their historicity and their popularity. But they capture the essence of this old-fashioned, meandering tale of two orphaned brothers in the 1950s and their journey in search of a future. “Lovin’ to go to one place and havin’ to go to another.”ĭuchess, the felonious foil to law-abiding Emmett, does not open Amor Towles’ new novel, “ The Lincoln Highway,” with those words. “Well, that’s life in a nutshell, ain’t it,” says Duchess, recently escaped from a boys’ detention center in Salina, Kan., and recently arrived at his friend Emmett’s Nebraska farm.
And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome.īursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller.If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy's plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. However, as soon as they've loaded Emmett's bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him. Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own - to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he's served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start - and that means heading out to the sparkling west. Signed Edition - with exclusive sprayed edges and extra content, 'Endnotes for British Readers'Ī unsigned exculsive edition is available hereĮmmett returns home to pick-up his little brother Billy, tie-up his late father's estate and get out of town for good.
0 kommentar(er)
